Thursday, August 31, 2017

Staunton, August 31 – When the USSR
existed, calling someone “anti-Soviet” was one of the most damning labels, even
if some wore that as a badge of honor, Artemy Troitsky says; but now that it
has ceased to exist, efforts to use “Russophobia” in the same way don’t work
nearly as well.

In an essay for Novaya gazeta, the music critic who has lived for many years in the
West says that he well remembers the application of “anti-Soviet” to any critic
of the Soviet system and thus is in a position to understand what the current
regime’s use “Russophobia” is actually about (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/08/30/73642-novoe-staroe-slovo).

Russophobia as a
charge appeared at the end of the 1990s ostensibly to serve as a replacement
for anti-Soviet, a term that ceased to exist when the Soviet system did.Such an attempt was based on the assumption
that “you don’t love the Soviet Union, then you are an anti-Soviet; you don’t
love Russia, then you are a Russophobe!”

“What could be simpler?”But there is a problem: the first term
concerns attitudes toward Soviet power, a state system, while the latter
concerns supposed negative attitudes toward the Russian people, their culture
and ethnicity, as such. Thus, many critics of the Russian government are denounced
as haters of Russians, something they as Russians reject.

Russophobes, Troitsky
continues, “are a mysterious breed! I suspect that in my entire life I have not
met or seen even one.” Many emigres and many in Russia “do not like the Kremlin
and condemn the policies it is carrying out. But the Kremlin whatever its
lackeys say is far from Russia as a whole!”

One Russian punk rock group sings “I
love my country but hate the government,” he says, echoing an attitude that is
to be found in many countries and reflecting a distinction that must be
maintained “between a country and its government” or “between religion and the
church.”

And there is the secret of what the
current charges of Russophobia are really about: a desire by the regime and its
supporters to impose on people the notion that any criticism of the government
is a criticism of the nation because the two are supposedly the same – an equation
that is not true and that must not be accepted as true.

The charge thus doesn’t really work
for “’internal consumption,’” the critic says. But it doesn’t work abroad
either.The Russian government may
assert that people in the West hate Russians but it is obvious to anyone who
has lived there that Westerners don’t hate Russians but they do oppose Kremlin
policies.

The Kremlin of course would like to
get everyone to forget that both to unite Russians behind itself and also to
shut up any critics of the crimes of the Kremlin. That is what the powers that
be want, but it is precisely why people should reject the term Russophobia just
as they have dispensed with the term anti-Soviet.

Even more than its predecessor, it
is fundamentally false and imaginary, an effort to revive in the 21st
century a term under false pretenses, “to equate the suffering Russian people
and the Russian state and the great Russian language, culture and character and
the crimes of Russian aggression, corruption and hypocrisy.”

Indeed, Troitsky suggests, the real
Russophobes are not those the Kremlin and its minions describe as such but the Kremlin
and its minions themselves.

Staunton,
August 30 – Two developments this week may be more connected than it would seem
at first glance: On the one hand, Vladimir Putin has ordered prosecutors to
investigate cases in which Russians have been compelled to study non-Russian
languages in the country’s republics (kremlin.ru/acts/assignments/orders/55464).

And on
the other, statistics have been released showing that the number of Russian
speakers in the world has declined by 50 million over the past 25 years, with
the number of Russian speakers beyond the borders of the Russian Federation now
roughly equal to those inside it.

Given
that the number of Russian speakers outside Russia is likely to continue to
decline – or at least that the trend in that regard is much subject to what
Moscow may do – it is at least plausible that Putin’s push against non-Russian
languages this summer in part reflects his desire to ensure that the number of
Russian speakers in the world doesn’t fall any faster than it has.

That
these two developments may be linked is explicitly suggested by experts Dmitry
Rodionov of Svobodnaya pressa surveyed
about the decline in the number of Russian speakers who collectively suggest
that “Russia itself is guilty in the downfall of the Russian language” (svpressa.ru/society/article/180317/).

Not only has a
large part of the older generation which was compelled to learn Russian in
Soviet times in the former republics and Warsaw Pact countries passed away with
younger people choosing not to learn Russian but rather English and other
languages, they say, but Russia no longer offers the kind of ideological
attractions that caused some to learn Russian in the past.

And Stanislav Byshok, an analyst
with the CIS-EMO monitoring group, adds the following which may go a long way
to explaining what Putin intends as far as the non-Russian languages inside the
Russian Federation, a factor that “is no less important” than the falling away
of people speaking Russian abroad.

“The primary bearers of Russian are
ethnic Russians and peoples tied to them,” the political analyst says. “Consequently,
in the frameworks of Russia, the study of Russia must not be limited by
anything, including the imposed need to study ‘national’ languages.”

And he adds: “In Russia we are
united not by a kaleidoscope of mutually unintelligible languages, dialects and
archaic traditions but by the Russian language and Russian, primarily literary,
culture.”

Such reflections go a long way to
explain the passion Putin brings to this idea and the fears many non-Russians
have about how their languages will be treated now that the Kremlin leader has
focused his attention on this issue.

Staunton, August 30 – The Moscow
media this week have celebrated survey results suggesting that Russians are becoming
ever more tolerant; but the findings of these polls in fact suggest that the
situation is rather more complicated than that and any celebration is at a
minimum premature.

Indeed, the
newspaper’s journalist, Mariya Nedyuk, admits as much when she writes that “it
is shown in Russia that our compatriots are tolerant toward religions but on
issues of nationality and culture, the population is divided in half” between
those who show tolerance and those who don’t.

She notes
that “only 32 percent” of Russians say they think any religion is superior to
any other, implicitly suggesting that far more have a different position. She
says that 48 percent do not believe in the superiority of one race over others
but also that 49 percent think that some cultures, including presumably their
own, are superior to others.

Further,
Nedyuk quotes Moscow sociologist Leokadiya Drobizheva to the effect that “only 30
percent” of Russians have a negative attitude toward non-Russians in general
but that those who oppose immigration are much more numerous and that “people
are much more tolerant on nationality issues in the republics than in the
megalopolises.”

And she
cites another Moscow sociologist, Vladimir Mukomel, who says that the reduction
in xenophobic attitudes among Russians found in surveys since 2013 is connected
above all not so much with a change of heart as with “a falloff in the
intensify of the information flow which could trigger xenophobia.”

In
support of that, Nedyuk concludes her article by pointing to a new finding by
the Levada Center that the share of Russians who want to limit the numbers of
other nationalities living in Russia has fallen to its lowest level over the
last 13 years. But she acknowledges that those who want to impose such limits
is still over half at 54 percent.